I Think Instagram Is The Worst Thing To Ever Happen To Photography

Peter Fenech with Canon DSLR camera with overlaid floral-like wallpaper of falling cameras From when Instagram was merely a curiosity – a spot where photographers who'd grown only a little fed up with its precursor, Flickr, could post their images in a less crowded environment. Flickr too was where once most of the cool photographers went to have their daily dose of ego-boosting. If you're feeling a bit uninspired, it had been Flickr you considered for moral support. There is a particular jolt of excitement whenever you saw the small bell icon light, indicating that somebody, around the world, had found you worth engaging their finger muscle for half of a second, to provide you some creative reassurance that you weren't only a nobody with a camera. Sound familiar? The reason why photographers tended to outgrow Flickr was that it had become a motor for mutual back-scratching, with little if any feedback that resembled constructive. The comments section was filled up with statements like “Incredible!”,  “Unreal!”, “Best photo I've ever seen!!!” and other such pronouncements of unbridled adoration. This gets old quickly. And so, in what became a typical story in the mid-2010s, I left my Flickr account to gather digital dust in the corner of my desktop. At no other amount of time in the annals of photography has anyone format as aggressively forced uniformity and genericness as Instagram Instagram, on another hand, was fresh. It had been like a clear Wetherspoons – still somewhat tacky but with lots of room to disseminate and experience the unusual quiet. You'd easily get your thirty likes, but people bothered to at the least elaborate on what they loved about your images. It wasn't a negative place to hold out. 500px was better, but when you wanted to make use of your phone, IG was easier. Naturally, though, it didn't last. Obviously, it didn't. The moment people realized money could possibly be created by posting pictures of themselves, posed with little modesty on a beach somewhere warmer, it became more about marketing than making friends. As an area note, pictures of me of this ilk were never created, in anxiety about crashing the platform. The story continues This brings us neatly to today's day. Instagram is really a behemoth that rules the entire world of content creation. Platforms that aren't Instagram try their finest to be. It is a fake world on the website, everybody knows it, and yet billions of men and women, photographers or not, flock to its gates every day. Pexels How come to this type of destructive pattern, I hear you ask. If people want to invest their lives showing the entire world how they'd like viewers to believe they spend their lives, without actually living, let them! Most aren't content creators anyway, so just why the negativity about ‘true photographers? At once social networking was an effective way to an end. It had been merely another platform on which to show our images, albeit a really pervasive one. When people posted on Instagram, it had been a method of gaining only a little extra recognition, somewhere you knew someone had seen your work. Today, for all photographers it's THE reason to modify the cameras. Everything they ever shoot is bound for ‘the gram '. Whole shoots are planned purely to fully capture images for the platform. At face value, this could not seem like a huge problem. If some photographers can successfully make a full-time income from it, then good on them. It's another possibility to break right into a competitive industry. However, the true damage is performed by the apparent promise of fame and fortune, pedaled by the elite model of influencers at the surface of the algorithmic ladder. Peter Fenech with camera These individuals have a vested fascination with buttering up Meta, Instagram's current overlords. Their story is unlikely to be repeated for all new photographers, less so now than ever. IG is saturated, bursting at the seams with content. It's neigh on impossible to increase to the very best nowadays, if you put up an account tomorrow, you're pretty unlikely to be paying off your mortgage with IG-derived income by next year. Many young photographers won't believe this though. Fresh-faced enthusiasts streaming out of universities, photography degrees at your fingertips, are desperate to be Insta-famous. It's their purpose in life. The worst part is, whilst the photo industry has long been competitive, the platform-specific requirements of Instagram mean files shot for social functions are largely useless off-platform. Everything is shot in portrait format, to maximize cropping possibilities on Insta. As a publication editor, it's all rather heartbreaking – you see an attractive thumbnail image set with color and drama, only to master it's a picture format image without any alternative options. Photographers are creating entire portfolios of images which may have only 1 function. On a publication, we're unlikely to print a picture shot across a dual page so, with this process, you may well be kissing off a sustainable income in the future. Digital Photographer new issue post on Instagram, displayed on a smartphone When Instagram is closed – and it will undoubtedly be when something more profitable for Meta arrives – we must be prepared. Photographers with common sense shoot multiple compositions of every subject they approach, so there will be an aspect ratio to suit, should a photo editor request one. Save your entire presets and back up your Lightroom Catalog, so alternative formats could be created with minimum fuss. And never, ever ‘Save for Web '. In my own humble opinion, Instagram has its place but has forgotten what this actually is. When it acts being an encouragement to young photographers to have out with a camera and document what they see, then it earns its keep. But driving everyone who taps the icon on their house screen to shoot the same image because the hundreds or thousands before them, in a structure that basically dooms their portfolio to editorial exile, can have a devastating impact on the photo industry in the coming years. Stifling creativity cannot be considered a good thing.